For the past several seasons, I’ve been doing weekly videos with Joe Osborne on the Covers YouTube channel, covering the biggest CFB games and topics of the week, along with the best betting opportunities to look out for.
It gives me great pleasure to announce that I'm now joining the Covers family in an expanded role for the upcoming 2026 season, further helping everyone get the most out of their college football bets each week.
I'm going to start by going into the basics of building a power rating — a key part of my betting process.
There are many ways to be profitable in sports betting.
- You can be a great "aggregator" of respected opinions.
- You can become an exceptional "shopper" when it comes to finding the best price in any individual market.
- Or you can be an "originator," which allows you to bet into inefficient, ill-liquid markets at open.
I practice all of the above, but I am most proud of — and spend the most time — being an "originator" in college football.
How to start your own power ratings for college football
It's never a requirement to bet on any sport, but if you want to originate, power ratings are the first step to any handicap. If you're starting to build a power rating or a "model," the best place to start is a final power rating from the previous season.
Curt Cignetti has taken Indiana from perennial doormats to National Champions in just two years, but the Hoosiers are the exception, not the rule. South Alabama simply doesn't turn into Alabama overnight.
Yes, the transfer portal has introduced much more variance to college football, but an overwhelming majority of schools’ power ratings change no more than a TD in any given season. That’s why every year, I start with my final power rating from the season prior.
Start with something established
If you don’t have your own power rating from a previous season to use, there are many solid power ratings available to the public.
- Bill Connelly’s SP+ on ESPN has been around for years. SP+ is a tempo and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency.
- ESPN also has its College Football Power Index (FPI), which represents how many points above or below average a team is. I personally don’t put much weight in their ratings, but they do get more accurate as the season progresses.
- Finally, Jeff Sagarin has posted his ratings for more than a quarter-century on USA Today. Besides my personal power ratings, which account for injuries, the Sagarin ratings most closely resemble the point spread of games.
So which one do you use to start off? Obviously, I think my ratings are the best, but using a weighted average of all the public power ratings would also be a reasonable start.
Adjust for new information
After you have a starting point, you'll need to start making adjustments for the upcoming season. Looking at each team, you have to consider:
- How much roster turnover has there been?
- Who graduated, who left early for the NFL, and who departed via the transfer portal?
- Similarly, who did a school bring in via the portal and recruiting?
Several sites track recruiting and the transfer portal. Personally, I think 247 Sports and On3 cover them the best, and I believe the transfer portal should be weighted much more heavily than the incoming freshman recruiting class.
If you're strapped for time and can't go through each team individually, there is still plenty of free material available, such as Bill Connelly’s returning production rankings. He accounts for everything in these rankings, including OL snaps, rushing, receiving, and passing yards, defensive snaps, tackles and TFLs — and also factors in transfers.
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Set your preseason ratings... by rating what changed
Upgrading the teams that return the most production — and downgrading the teams that return the fewest — would yield a solid starting point to a pre-reason rating.
One of the methods I use in developing initial power ratings for each team is what I call position-by-position "Up/Downs."
Basically, I go through every position group for each team and give a value, ranging from -3 to +3, for QBs, RBs, WRs, TEs, OL, DL, LBs, DBs, Special Teams, Coaches, and Intangibles.
A team with a +3 for a single position means that I have that position rated up three points from the previous season, and a -3 for a single position means that I have that position down three points from the previous season.
With 10 different categories, the maximum value a team can be up or down from the previous season is 30. That +30 or -30 points rarely, if ever, happens — and the only example I can give you in the last 15 years of a team being nearly four TDs different (power ratings wise) from the previous season is UCF in 2015.
The Knights went 0-12 (-24 points per game) in 2015, following a 9-4 season where they were plus-9 points per game. I had them power-rated 27 points lower by the end of the season.
For the coaches’ category, new coaches can sometimes be downgraded as they're new to a program and don’t fully know the strengths and weaknesses of the players yet. They could also be installing new schemes on offense and/or defense, which the current players might not fit that style of play.
The intangibles category covers a broad range of factors, including:
- Close wins and losses from the previous year.
- Strength of schedule (is it weaker or stronger than last year?).
- Turnovers.
- Injuries (were they healthy or banged up last year?). Besides QB and coach, this is the most important category that can indicate if a team is primed to be better (or worse) in the upcoming season.
More college football resources from Covers
- College Football National Championship odds
- Heisman Trophy odds
- Best college football betting sites
- College football futures
How to use power ratings
Once you feel you have a solid power rating, you can utilize those ratings to project point spreads between any two teams by:
- Subtracting the two numbers for a neutral field point spread.
- Subtracting the two numbers and adding homefield advantage (generally around 3 points) for a normal game.
This can often serve as a quick test to see if your power ratings formula is working — and how close it is to the actual point spread of a game. Once you have your ratings, if the spread for a game differs from what your ratings indicate... you've found a potential edge and a market to wager on.
For example, here were the final Top 5 teams in my 2025 power ratings:
| Rank | Team | Power Rating |
|---|---|---|
| 1 |  Indiana |
96.40 |
| 2 |  Ohio State |
92.65 |
| 3 |  Notre Dame |
92.28 |
| 4 |  Miami |
89.59 |
| 5 |  Oregon |
89.50 |
Using these numbers, Indiana would be around a 6.5 to 7-point favorite vs. Miami on a neutral field (96.4-89.59=6.81).
That lined up pretty close to where the spread was for the National Championship (Indiana was -7.5 at Miami, although Indiana had the crowd edge). Postgame, I made a slight adjustment for Miami slightly overachieving in the game, as the Hurricanes had the yardage and yards-per-play advantage.
If your ratings had Indiana 14+ points better than Miami — or the two teams close to even — then I would seriously consider tweaking your inputs.
Your ratings should never be too far off the market at the end of the season. Now, the beginning of the season (with few data points available)... is a different story.
Recap: How to get your ratings off the ground
And with that, you're off to the races with a preliminary set of power ratings to start improving your handicapping for this season. To recap the basic steps to get your ratings going:
| Start with last year's ratings | Use your own, or start with a blend of available ratings from sources you trust |
| Learn what has changed | What did each program lose/add during the offseason? |
| Adjust ratings based on changes | Put a value on the changes each team experienced |
| Tweak during the season | More info on that to come! |
I'll explain this process more in the coming months— specifically, how to adjust your ratings as the action starts — but hopefully this helps you get a better understanding of where I'm coming from and the level of detail "originators" put into creating power ratings each off-season.
Happy handicapping!
More about Brad Powers
For those that don’t know me, I wanted to be involved in sports journalism nearly my entire life — even going so far as to get a broadcast journalism degree from Bowling Green.
The problem was, at the time (20 years ago), the newspaper industry was shrinking, and there wasn’t much opportunity in doing entry-level sports radio... so I got a job at Phil Steele Publications, which is best known for its college football preview magazine.
While in-depth college football coverage was my true passion, I soon found out what really pays the bills: And that's when sports betting entered my life. During my six years there, I received crash courses on how to handicap, building power ratings, how to market, and more.
What I didn’t learn was how to bet — which requires a different skill set — so I moved to Las Vegas, which at the time, was the only place in the country where you could legally wager on sports.
For the next decade, I was heavily involved in day-to-day betting, with an emphasis on college football and the NFL, and was involved with several sports betting shows and podcasts on networks such as Fox Sports Radio, ESPN Radio, and VSiN.
Now... here I am, still doing all of the above — but from my beloved farm in Ohio.
